By Frederick N. Rasmussen , Sun Reporter|April 06, 2008
The next time you're watching the noir classic Kiss of Death, take note of the woman Richard Widmark ties to a wheelchair and shoves down a flight of stairs -- and into film history. It's none other than Mildred Dunnock, a Baltimorean and member of the Goucher College Class of 1922.
"Millie was a real pro and not above being tied to a wheelchair and sent to her death down a flight of stairs," said former Goucher President Rhoda M. Dorsey the other day.
Widmark, who died last month, made his film debut as the giggling psychopath Tommy Udo in Henry Hathaway's Kiss of Death.
The 1947 film, whose screenplay was written by Ben Hecht and Charles Lederer, stars Brian Donlevy, Coleen Gray and Karl Malden.
Udo, an ex-convict, exacts revenge on Ma Rizzo, played by Dunnock, whose son is an underworld informant, by ripping a cord from a lamp, tying her with it into her wheelchair and sending the chair bouncing down the stairs.
While movie critics refer to Dunnock as an "old woman," she was actually in her late 40s when she played the wheelchair scene.
Mildred Dorothy Dunnock was born in Baltimore on Jan. 25, 1901, and lived at 2317 Maryland Ave.
It was while she attended the old Western High School on Gwynns Falls Parkway that Dunnock's interest in the theater began when a teacher asked her to read from the Bible at a school assembly.
"The experience disclosed that though I was a shy little thing, I had a voice," she told The Sun Magazine in a 1949 interview. "The discovery gave me confidence and led to my playing Lady Gwendolyn Fairfax in that hardy perennial, Oscar Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest."
After graduating from Western in 1918, she enrolled at Goucher College, then at 23rd and St. Paul streets, where she joined Agora, the college's dramatic society.
"I like Baltimore, but it has some unhappy memories for me," she told The Evening Sun in a 1942 interview.
"You see, I used to play the male leads in Goucher plays before men were allowed in the casts. And I recall with shame the times my voice would suddenly change from my assumed baritone to a girlish soprano. It always happened in the most dramatic scenes," Dunnock said.
Dunnock's relatives were cool to her desire for a career in the theater and did their best to discourage her, hoping she would get married and become a homemaker.
When a college counselor suggested she study for a master's degree in theater, her father was less than enthusiastic.
